1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an image pickup apparatus including an image pickup element.
2. Description of the Related Art
Recent digital cameras (image pickup apparatuses) allow low noise image capturing of a night scene or a starry sky by manually performing long-exposure image capturing without setting an image capturing mode to a night scene mode that involves increasing the sensitivity. Some digital cameras have an image capturing mode that allows image capturing with a strobe by irradiating a main object with strobe light to achieve an appropriate exposure therefor and bright image capturing of a background by long-exposure image capturing, as performed in slow synchronization. For example, Japanese Patent Laid-open No. H4-215633 discloses a multiple-exposure camera capable of performing multiple exposure by image capturing with strobe light and long-exposure image capturing.
However, in a particular shot scene involving, for example, image capturing mainly of a starry sky, the image capturing at a desired exposure for the starry sky potentially causes overexposure due to a too bright object such as a building included in a shot image. In addition, enhancement of stars after image capturing potentially causes too much enhancement of the edge of the object such as a building included in the shot image. Furthermore, setting an exposure appropriate for the starry sky at image capturing by slow synchronization potentially results in too bright image capturing, which is overexposure, of a main object depending on its way of being irradiated with external light. Since an object included in a shot image of image capturing mainly of the starry sky differs between shot scenes such as city and countryside, image processing appropriate for the shot scene is preferably performed with taken into consideration the starry sky and other objects included in the shot image.